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UESF
Commentary
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Teachers under attack
By Dennis Kelly, UESF President
Published in the San Francisco Examiner on Thursday, December 9, 2004The San Francisco Board of Education has rewarded the superintendent with the best contract ever offered to a school worker on our enchanted peninsula. In addition to a paycheck of a quarter of a million dollars, the contract is laden with so many goodies that Santa probably could not squeeze them down the chimney.
This largesse has not been available to the rest of the educators in San Francisco, and that creates a concern. Had there been a 12 percent salary boost for everyone on the table (combined with a housing allowance, educational leave and rolling-over vacation days to create a total package closer to a $60,000 raise), then perhaps the top administrator's windfall would not rankle so many so deeply. But the San Francisco Unified School District has unilaterally eliminated the Employee Assistance Program of $40,000 and quibbles over whether to pay the contractual rate for Saturday work in "Dream Schools" or pay $ 9 less -- the extended-hours rate. It also tries to use "Catch-22" language so child-development teachers "volunteer" for additional work instead of having it assigned to them at their daily rate of pay. The priorities of the district reveal themselves in sharp contrast: For the superintendent, it will give her all she can get; for teachers, it will give them as little as it can.
Superintendent Arlene Ackerman boasted that she has invested in quality teaching ["Closing S.F.'s teaching gap," Dec. 1]. She refers to modest pay raises of four years past and the nebulous promise of future voter support to raise salaries. These are coupled with crocodile tears about how difficult it is to fire teachers. She does not acknowledge that it is her appointees who hire teachers and evaluate teachers. She neglects to mention the administration's virtually unbridled right to "non-re-elect" teachers in their first two years of service. She skips over the union's work with the district on the peer evaluation process, and she does not comment on the historic practice of counseling teachers into separation or early retirement rather than firing them.
Ackerman perverts her less than glowing support for quality teaching into an attack on those who disagree with using "reconstitution" to staff targeted schools. Rather than offer a shred of evidence that "reconstitution" has improved a single school, she attacks her critics and suggests they oppose good education. She does not discuss the abysmal lack of resources that cripples public education. Rather, she implies that by shaking out some teachers, plopping in others and making them work nine-hour days, all the neglect of society will be cured.
For a quarter of a million dollars a year, San Francisco deserves better thinking and planning than that.
